Big Pharma buys Harvard Big Lies

Specifically, those are the lies of Harvard child psychiatrist Joseph Biederman, along with colleague Timothy Wilens.

The pair admitted each getting more than $1.6 million in Big Pharma consulting fees from 2000-2007; another Harvard prof, Thomas Spencer, admitted getting more than $1 million in that time.

Here’s an example of the lies Biederman had been telling in the past about Big Pharma payoffs:

In one example, Dr. Biederman reported no income from Johnson & Johnson for 2001 in a disclosure report filed with the university. When asked to check again, he said he received $3,500. But Johnson & Johnson told (Sen. Charles) Grassley that it paid him $58,169 in 2001, Grassley found.

Meanwhile, Biederman, after getting busted, had this laughable reply:

In an e-mailed statement, Dr. Biederman said, “My interests are solely in the advancement of medical treatment through rigorous and objective study,” and he said he took conflict-of-interest policies “very seriously.”

Wilens and Spencer said in their own e-mails they thought they had complied with conflict-of-interest rules.
Tenure or no tenure, Harvard ought to do everything they can do to fire the trio.

Obviously, Biederman’s shilling psychotropic drugs for juvenile use is HUGELY flawed; plus, it’s obvious he has violated federal and university research rules.

Beyond that, it’s even more obvious the trio violated basic scientific standards.

Death by forced IV overdose of Prozac would be about right.

Dallas County being sued for false imprisonment

Specifically, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department and Sheriff Lupe Valdez, for false imprisonment issues.

The plaintiff? Lancaster ISD orchestra director Theresa Dobbs, who made national news headlines two years ago after being “forgotten” in Dallas County’s Lew Sterrett Justice Center, aka the Dallas County Jail, for three days before finally bonding out.

For those of you not familiar with the story, in late 2005, Dobbs got a ticket for driving without a seat belt after being busted in a mall parking lot. She intended to fight the ticket, but entered the wrong court date in her day planner. Well, at the end of August, and the start of the Lancaster ISD school year, a zealous Dallas County constable’s officer, Ronald Bostic (perhaps overzealous, to put it mildly), showed up at Lancaster High School with a warrant.

Then, it got Kafkaesque. Due to paperwork mixups, misfilings, a screwy system, etc., she got forgotten about for three days. Basically, a clerk didn't retrieve her paperwork from a tray, and she wasn't placed on the daily municipal court docket. The morning and afternoon “cattle calls” for bail hearings? She never got called.

It gets worse. A friend came by, thinking she was there, to bail her out. The sheriff’s department said she wasn’t there.

Finally, she asked a person in the next holding cell, when that person got out, to contact the “outside world.”

Lupe Valdez has already faced enough problems over Lew Sterrett that I cannot believe she wouldn’t settle this, even if Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins is advising otherwise.

Add to that a $17 million county budget shortfall, and I don’t get why the county won’t settle.

But, nooh. (And I’ve heard that Valdez not Watkins, is the holdup on a settlement anyway).

Instead, with general election season just around the corner, this baby’s going to trial in July.

Not being a registered Democrat, AND someone who thinks the idea of electing sheriff’s is stupid, this is all enough to make one seriously consider pulling the level for Lowell Cannady.

As a point of snark, somebody has started a MySpace page for Lew Sterrett.

Early winner on Kevin Drum’s worst post of the week

The comments, as well as Kevin’s original post, about the possibility of Hillary Clinton as Barack Obama’s VP are what make this one such a doozy.

Commenters proposing her for SCOTUS. Commenters saying she could run in 2016, imagining that sexism in the MSM and elsewhere would lessen with her being an “old woman” of 68 at that point.

Of course, Kevin ignoring the fact that Clinton’s campaign shoved her name into Obama’s face as part of wondering if she really wants it is interesting enough. And, then, there’s the waste of cyberspace by linking to the latest pro-Hillary inanity from pro-corporate shill Armando.

I'll venture that Clinton supporters like Juliet, a poster over at the WM threat, want to be "stroked." And no, not by Obama himself, but by Obama supporters who don't seem inclined to do that yet. Or possibly ever.

That's exactly what Arachnae is saying.

I don't many will vote for McCain, but, will a fair amount stay home? Yes.

If Vegas gave me odds on a certain percentage, I'd even make a small online bet.

A Euro heads-up to U.S. immigration policy

Eurozone countries that have tighter skill-restrictive immigration policies actually end up with a less skilled mix of immigrants than countries with more open immigration.

For example, 45 percent of Ireland’s foreign-born residents and 34 percent of Britain’s have a university degree, compared with only 19 percent in Germany and 11 percent in Italy.

A Fistful of Euros, the best left-of-center overview blog of European issues I know of, has its overview of this paradox. As AFOE notes, there’s enough variation among Eurozone countries in immigration policies that an answer to this paradox may ultimately spit itself out.

Is it an English-language issue? Spain is getting more immigrants from Latin America, while both the UK and Ireland are getting an influx from current and former Commonwealth countries.

For the nonce, though, it seems clear the next president of the U.S. needs to lighten up on the drastic post-9/11 tightening of immigration.

Of course, as one commenter to the AFOE piece notes, Americans don’t even have to look across the pond: Canada has both looser immigration standards and, arguably, less xenophobia than the U.S.

Public financing of Congressional elections?

Whatever happened to it after Democrats regained Congress?

Oh, it likely went down the earmark rabbit hole.

And, it’s interesting, or hypocritical, that Barack Obama says he would force Congress to cut any earmark-laden bill it sends him next year, in light of:

Anti-pork watchdogs, for example, point to the $1.8 million in five earmarks for Chicago's Shedd Aquarium, which ran $8 million in the black last year and has embarked on a four-year, $100 million fundraising campaign. With that kind of money, why should taxpayers fund a $400,000 program earmarked by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to help the aquarium conduct a program aimed at preventing juvenile delinquency, watchdog groups ask.

Somehow, I doubt that particular item would be on President Obama’s chopping block.

As for Schmuck Talk Express™, there’s plenty of ways of bringing home Congressional bacon without earmarks. All you have to do is defend old, entrenched federal largesse. Out West, that means, below-market grazing fees on federal land, below-market water rates from federally-impounded lakes and below-market hydroelectricity rates. It’s called Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam.

There’s two ways to really reform Congress.

One is to pass a public campaign finance bill.

With one HUGE caveat. It has to include reasonable provisions for financing third-party campaigns. (Fat chance of that actually happening, though.)

The second is to amend the Constitution to put House members on a four-year election cycle.

You CAN prove the nonexistence of God

And, the proof is simple and elegant.

So much so that I can’t believe atheists even more philosophically versed than I readily sign off on the “you can’t prove the nonexistence of God” argument.

Per formal symbolic logic, the attempt to prove the nonexistence of anything is the equivalent of dividing by zero, basically.

But Bob Carroll, creator of The Skeptic’s Dictionary, goes back to classical times and the good old modus tollens.

To begin any such proof, we must begin with clarifying our terms. What do we mean by “God”? If you mean “eternal, all-powerful, all-good, invisible being who created the universe out of nothing but an act of will” then I would proceed thusly:

Premise 1. If God exists, then innocents should not suffer the horrendous torments of famines, floods, hurricanes, etc.

Premise 2. Innocents do suffer the horrendous torments etc.

Therefore, God does not exist.

All well and good. It gets directly at the problem of evil, and can be extended, with the proper subpremises/subwarrants, in the face of people who will quote the Yahweh of Job and Romans, or the kismet of Islam, etc, and say that “God’s ways are above human ways.”

(Those subpremises all hinge on the psychological suffering of a God who either can’t or won’t make his ways explicable to/understandable by human ways.)

Back to Carroll, who talks more about the argument in general and primarily about the first premise:

The above proof (by modus tollens) is valid. The second premise is indisputable. You and others will probably quibble over the first premise. Perhaps you will claim that God must have good reasons for allowing innocents to suffer so terribly, even if we don't understand them. Perhaps, but that seems to beg the question. It hardly seems an adequate justification for believing in God. In any case, whatever objection you bring up to my proof will hinge on your extending the meaning of “God” to include qualities that will seem contradictory to me.

Either that, or by “lowering your expectations” to a faith in a god who is either far less than omnipotent or else far less than omnibenevolent.